Inclusive Civic Technology for People with Disabilities: Leaving No One Behind
About 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability, of whom 2–4% experience significant difficulties in functioning. In Uganda, People with Disability (PWDs) constitute 12.4 percent of the country’s population according to the 2014 Housing and Population Census. In the US, more than one in four (>25%) of today’s 20-year-olds can expect to be out of work for at least a year because of a disabling condition before they reach the normal retirement age.
Across Africa, PWDs continue to be marginalized and often left out during the policymaking process, including lobbying efforts, voting, and serving as elected representatives. In Uganda, few organisations cater for PWDs and also make it difficult for them to access employment opportunities. These inequalities still exist in both the public and private sector especially related to public accessibility and transportation, which prevents persons with disabilities from full civic and social participation.
However, the Ugandan government through the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development is mandated to promote and protect the rights of people with disabilities (PWDs). The policy on disability is aimed at contributing to the improvement of the quality of life of People with Disabilities (PWDs) through expanding the scope of interventions.
In so doing, productive and decent work conditions enables people with disabilities to realize their aspirations, improve their living conditions and participate more inclusively in society. Even with the various efforts to promote inclusiveness and cooperation among person with disabilities, they continue to be sidelined because disability policies are usually developed on behalf of people with disabilities, rather than with their direct participation.
What can Civic Tech Do?
Innovations in technology have become a means to empower individuals with disabilities by becoming a tool for independence and inclusivity. Through innovations in civic technology, we can bring persons with disabilities into the debates, conversations, and public spheres where they have been traditionally marginalized. Making it easier for PWDs to vote, to access information, to participate in discussions, are all parts of a flourishing civic technology and engagement ecosystem.
Assistive Technologies
Now commonplace applications such as Text-to-Voice services (Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa) were developed for persons with visual impairments but now have now grown to broader applications, just as voice recognition technology.
Many assistive technologies have been created that can be found in your smartphones with a range of functions that go unnoticed by many users. These powerful features are designed for partially sighted people but are of value to a much wider group. They include making characters bold, inverting the colours of the text and background, enhancing brightness, zooming on screen to ease readability and much more.
“With more than one billion people with disabilities in the world, it is critical that we work together to ensure inclusivity in civic tech so that services and technology are designed with people of all abilities in mind.” ~ Annmarie Levins (General Manager, Technology & Civic Engagement, Microsoft)
Accessibility
The A11Y Project is a community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier. Accessibility (a11y) is a measure of a computer system’s accessibility is to all people, including those with disabilities or impairments. It concerns both software and hardware and how they are configured in order to enable a disabled or impaired person to use that computer system successfully.
For example, popular social media site, Twitter introduced a feature that can help describe pictures to visually impaired Twitter users. The feature aims at making the images shared on the platform accessible to everyone, including those who are visually impaired.
When you add an image to a tweet, each thumbnail in the composer will have an “add description” button and then people who are visually impaired will have access to the description via their assistive technology.
Smart Cities
Microsoft through it’s doing its Smart Cities for All initiative is empowering civic leaders to ensure that citizens with disabilities are included in reaping the benefits of Smart Cities. The initiative is aimed at defining the state of accessible technology in cities worldwide with a focus on closing the digital divide for people with disabilities and older people.
In Toronto, Canada, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is seeking to become first smart city aimed at blending people-centered urban design with cutting-edge technology to achieve new standards of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity for all. This is expected to create a whole section focused on helping people with disabilities to improve on their accessibility of public services.
Where are we now in Uganda?
In order for people with disabilities to connect with governments, civic technologists need to create tools and solutions that facilitate communication and also allow for full expression in policy and public debates. These tools can help PWDs to become involved in the decision-making processes about policies that affect how they live in society.
That makes one wonder, how accessible are the current e-Government websites? Do they require a mouse to navigate the site? Is the text easy to read? Can persons with learning disabilities easily understand the information presented? Are the colours on the website appropriate for persons with visual disabilities? Are they people who can communicate in sign language at large government offices?
At the just concluded two-day Kampala Geopolitics conference, there
was a discussion centred around “Leaving No One Behind” and the
economic cost of excluding minorities, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 agenda, developed by the United Nations.
Moses Echodu, a PWD from Ugandan stated, “I can’t really say that
have seen any civic tech initiatives being put in place but what I do
know is that some advocacy is being done so as to bring about
inclusion. The major ones have been in acquiring advanced technology
for the deaf and blind but I don’t know about the progress. The question of advanced technology is now one that is still to have answers”.
At the same event, in a mini chat with Hon. Nalule Safia Jjuuko, the National Female PWD Member of Parliament, Uganda, she noted that they have lobbied and put policies in place to try and increase inclusivity of the people with disabilities but there are no evaluation processes in place to fast track their performance. She further added that they tabled a paper before the London Summit on Disability early this year and are waiting for deliberations on it.
However, for tech-based initiatives to flourish, there has to be complete inclusion from all stakeholders and governments. In some communities, even with existing initiatives of civic tech to help boost participation, there has been continued inefficiency due to digital divide in society. Whereas some individuals have access to internet and advanced technology and some do not and the cost, availability, accessibility features, and lack of knowledge on how to use these tools continues to be a barrier to people with disabilities.
Written by Pius Enywaru, Communications Lead at Pollicy
